


I've Been Yes and I've Been Oh Hell No

by knight_tracer, paperclipbitch



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Audio Format: M4B, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Community: pod_together, Gen, Podfic, Podfic Length: 30-45 Minutes, Post-Season/Series 01 Finale, obnoxiously tags to come let's face it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-08 18:21:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1951368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knight_tracer/pseuds/knight_tracer, https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Antoine went to SHIELD Academy, he’s worked on various teams, and everyone he worked with was kind of similar. Okay, with hindsight they were possibly all HYDRA, but he knew pretty much what to expect from them. This team are a deeply disconcerting mixture of oversharingly friendly and actively hostile, often in the same sentence, and they’re buzzing around like Disney characters trying to build a new SHIELD in what is basically an aircraft hanger with vending machines with a handful of people like it’s not a semi-impossible task, like half the world doesn’t hate their guts right now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've Been Yes and I've Been Oh Hell No

**Author's Note:**

> Written for pod_together! Title from _Save Me, San Francisco_ by Train, shut up, everyone loves Train secretly. Set post-finale, but in a world where Fitz is totally fine and unaffected by anything, okay.
> 
> Beta and cover art by podcath.

Podfic Length: 31:35  
Download Links: [mp3](http://knight-tracer.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/I've%20Been%20Yes%20and%20I've%20Been%20Oh%20Hell%20No.mp3) | [m4b](http://knight-tracer.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/I've%20Been%20Yes%20and%20I've%20Been%20Oh%20Hell%20No.m4b) (Right-click, select 'save as')

Now there’re less people shooting at his head on an hourly basis, Antoine has time to realise how weird this whole thing is. It’s not like his life was particularly normal beforehand, what with his - _X-Files_ job and a grandfather who gets out the _That Time Captain America And I Got Kicked Out Of A Bar_ story every Thanksgiving, but it was a regular kind of weird that he’d gotten used to.

He’s now one of the last remaining SHIELD agents on the planet, unless there are a handful left in deep cover that managed to skip the whole place imploding, and even that’s not that weird when compared to this team he’s ended up on. 

Antoine went to SHIELD Academy, he’s worked on various teams, and everyone he worked with was kind of similar. Okay, with hindsight they were possibly all HYDRA, but he knew pretty much what to expect from them. This team are a deeply disconcerting mixture of oversharingly friendly and actively hostile, often in the same sentence, and they’re buzzing around like Disney characters trying to build a new SHIELD in what is basically an aircraft hanger with vending machines with a handful of people like it’s not a semi-impossible task, like half the world doesn’t hate their guts right now.

May, at least, is May: the stuff of legend, professional to the point of being genuinely scary, and impossible to read unless she wants you to. That’s fine; Antoine knows what to do with that. He has no idea what to do with anyone else. Coulson seems to want to adopt all of them like they’re three-legged puppies, while Fitz and Simmons are codependent and talk too fast and seem to have adopted “vague and incoherent” as their general mission statement. Skye, at least, seems to get this whole situation: Antoine looks up sometimes and catches her: _what the shit is even happening right now_ expressions.

(There was that time he went to get some more coffee and found Jemma and Skye sitting over mugs of tea and having what looked like a traditionally girly conversation until he heard what they were actually saying.

“I’m fine,” Skye insisted, “like, it’ll take a bit of time, but I’m fine.”

“It’s okay,” Jemma told her, laying her hand over Skye’s, “we’ve all made out with murderous fascists at one point or another.”

Antoine caught his laugh in his throat as he realised that Jemma was apparently genuine. And Fitz made a noise of agreement from where he was trying to kick the vending machine into a free candy bar. 

There is seriously something _completely fucking wrong_ with all of these people.)

Basically, this is his life these days: seriously weirded out while trying not to show it, and avoiding the calls from his mom asking if he’s bringing back the Howling Commandos stuff anytime soon.

-

There are meetings; endless meetings. Coulson is genuinely interested in everyone’s opinions, wanting to build up SHIELD again in a way where people tell other people what they’re thinking, and not something totally unrelated. If nothing else, Antoine muses, it might get stuff done a bit quicker, not having to wander around with a decoder ring for everything from suicide missions to coffee orders.

Some meetings go better than others, of course. For every meeting where they come up a dozen great ideas to protect the world and each other, there are at least four others where they get nothing done. Actually, “nothing” is a pretty generous assessment: Fitz and Simmons are usually so caffeinated that nobody can understand what they’re saying, let alone try to follow the concept behind the blur of words, Skye is streaming _Orange Is the New Black_ under the table, and May starts cracking her knuckles in a distinctly murderous fashion.

And that’s not even including the week of meetings about uniform, which go very smoothly until May finally works out that the colour scheme they’ve all suggested is actually ripped off from the original _Star Trek_ , and that Fitz has essentially dressed everyone but him and Jemma in red. They might’ve gotten away with it anyway, except that the shade of mustard yellow all the command people would have to wear is really really ugly.

“I’m a doctor, not a fashion designer!” Fitz protests.

Antoine chokes on his herbal tea, and Jemma bites her lips tightly together, eyes bright. May says nothing, but looks at Fitz for a long moment.

Fitz looks at his hands. “I am an engineer who can be replaced by other engineers,” he recites.

It doesn’t matter that it probably isn’t true; May likes to keep them all on their toes.

-

It’s kind of startling, how little time it took for SHIELD to fall apart. Only a handful of weeks ago he had colleagues and a command structure and a superior officer who didn’t _seem_ like a crazy murdery HYDRA agent, more like a friend who occasionally got kind of scary facial expressions. And now there’s nothing – the last shreds of SHIELD hiding out in what feels like an aircraft hanger most of the time, subsisting on coffee and something that might be hope and might be resignation.

Antoine’s not a pessimist by nature, so he hasn’t given up on their new project, but it’s hard not to look at how few of them there are and how much the rest of the world actively _hates_ SHIELD now, and not start using phrases like _bitten off more than you can chew_. Even with the elaboratedly colour-coded charts FitzSimmons have made that are really just To Do Lists in disguise, it’s ridiculous how much they have to achieve and how few their resources really are.

Still, it’s not all bad, his agency being semi-defunct. Antoine’s found plenty of time to catch up on reading, and has even reactivated his Netflix account. He’s actually seen more than one episode of _Breaking Bad_ now. Okay, so the people who used to try and talk to him about it around their – occasionally literal – watercooler are pretty much all dead now, but if he doesn’t focus on that part, it’s nearly nice to be not quite as out of step with the world as usual.

(Thursday morning, he goes to find out whether there’s anything to drink other than boxes and boxes of tea, and finds Jemma eating a KitKat and reading _The National Enquirer_.

“It’s research!” she says quickly, while Antoine starts searching the various cabinets in their makeshift breakroom in the hope there are some coffee filters left. Fitz has this habit of stealing them and using them for… well, building stuff, Antoine has no idea exactly what, and is frankly too afraid to ask.

“…right,” Antoine says. “That makes sense.”

He gives up on trying to make coffee, and instead turns his attention to the tea: PG Tips for the Brits, green for May, the peppermint and camomile ones Coulson pretends he didn’t bring in, and the luridly coloured fruit teas that Skye drinks. 

“Any number of these people could be aliens!” Jemma says quickly, the flush in her cheeks a little sheepish. 

“Of course,” Antoine agrees mildly, selecting a raspberry and echinacea tea with trepidation.

Jemma pouts, and turns the page. “Also Leo stole my copy of _Us Weekly_ ,” she mumbles.

Antoine smiles and says nothing, but feels a little better about the three hours of _Say Yes To The Dress_ he found himself streaming yesterday afternoon.)

A few weeks ago, Antoine had a clearly defined job. Weird shit happened as part of it, yeah, but the parameters made sense, and he had colleagues and back-up and sick days and dental and colleagues that he at least _thought_ he knew. He knew what he was doing, or at least it felt enough like he did that it made no difference. Now, they’re making it up as they go along, and he still doesn’t really know what to do with that.

-

“Oh!” Jemma says happily, “it’s my birthday! That means each of you gives me ten pounds!”

Skye is facedown on the table at this point, though she peels one eyelid open for long enough to fish a yellow banknote out of the dwindling pile in front of her. “You’re cheating,” she mumbles.

“I’m not cheating!” Jemma protests, taking the notes from all of them with a flourish.

“She’s just enthusiastic,” Fitz adds.

Fitz and Simmons are still their alarming kind of perky and cheerful, though they’re the only ones who are. There’s a lot of candy and caffeinated beverages on the table right now, but nothing that really explains their bright-eyed happiness after several solid hours of Monopoly. Sure, that _Breaking Bad_ marathon Antoine spent a week mired in made him think that maybe they should be using some part of SHIELD’s labs to cook up meth – it would solve at least some of their potential funding problems – but he definitely hasn’t gotten around to mentioning it to May yet.

Antoine and Skye did try and covertly start a drinking game – take a shot every time Fitz or Simmons successfully buys a property and then starts piling on houses to tax the shit out of the rest of them – but that was pretty short-lived. They should possibly have guessed that FitzSimmons would take their board games _really_ seriously. They only have themselves to blame for agreeing to this.

“Do any of those little cards have the option for you to kill the rest of us and put us out of our misery?” Skye asks, finally pushing herself upright.

Considering the one before Jemma’s apparent birthday involved solving a prize-winning crossword, Antoine is going to assume not. “I doubt it.”

Skye shrugs. “We’re playing the British version,” she reminds him, “they could have _anything_ in there.”

Antoine found The FitzSimmons British Board Game Closet while he was ransacking their half-built lab for coffee filters. He now regrets mentioning it to anybody, but sometimes being a SHIELD agent involves making the bad decision in order to learn from it.

Like hey, maybe don’t play Monopoly against your resident codependent nerds.

“It is _four a.m._ ,” Skye groans. “How is it four a.m.? Why is it four a.m.? When do we have to get here in the morning?”

Antoine makes a mental note that maybe this time around, more SHIELD buildings could involve windows. Not big ostentatious glass ones just asking to be shot out, of course, but _windows_. He feels like he’s been in this strip-lit base for half a lifetime, watching Jemma crow delightedly over tying up Mayfair and Park Lane before adding on the hotels. It’s clearly going to end in a death match between Fitz and Jemma, if the carefully drawn tally chart in the lid of the box is anything to go by, and since Skye is clinging grimly onto a handful of cheap properties and Antoine is leaking cash as he makes his way around the board, he assumes that’s going to be sooner, not later. 

It doesn’t mean that any of them are going to get any sleep before Coulson shows up for the – what day is it again? – _Thursday_ morning meeting. Which is about… something, anyway. Antoine was sitting next to Fitz and his Stark pad at their last meeting; he didn’t even know Candy Crush Saga _had_ a level 614.

He kneads his eyes for a long moment, cracks his knuckles, and then reaches for the dice. If SHIELD’s taught him nothing else recently, it’s that if you’re going down anyway, you should go down screaming, no grace at all.

“Okay,” Antoine says, “let’s do this.”

-

You can learn a lot about the mettle of people when you’re all trying to avoid death together, as your jobs collapse around you and what used to be a matter of national security turns instead into a matter of your own life and death. It occurs to Antoine sometimes, in the dark of night when he’s supposed to be sleeping and he’s once again picking things apart to find out what he _missed_ with Garrett, that he owes his life to Jemma Simmons. She doesn’t see it that way, he can tell, but there’s a gratitude there, a debt, one that slots a little awkwardly with his place on this team. All the people he used to trust to have his back are dead, after all.

Anyway, the point is that you can figure out a bunch of stuff about your new teammates when you’re all frantically scrabbling to survive and maybe track down your elusive maybe-dead one-eyed boss into the bargain, but you can learn so many other things from the day to day minutiae. From the terrible games they play on their phones when there’s nothing else to do – Skye’s been playing the _Frozen_ version of Candy Crush for over a month now – to the solitaire high score on their computers – May’s is frankly _terrifying_ – to the music they play when they think no one’s listening – Fitz’s lab has entire not-actually-secret Katy Perry playlist queued up for late nights. Coulson’s got a collection of Captain America and Howling Commandos memorabilia; Jemma fills in crosswords in blue ballpoint pen, while Fitz corrects any of her wrong answers in green; May has reportedly seen every episode of _Top Model_ ever made, though she refuses to confirm or deny this.

It’s important to be sure that the person who’s got your back can shoot straight or at the very least land a really good incapacitating punch to the jaw, but it’s maybe just as important to be able to see a little more of them when it isn’t all or nothing.

After all, the last guy Antoine worked with who he knew could kill an adversary in thirty-six different bloodless ways but couldn’t name his preference for vending machine snack? Yeah, that ended well. 

-

The text says: _I know you’re all about the health and stuff, but we have takeout, and you’re going to starve because there’s nothing else, come down_.

Antoine feels a little like Skye’s had one half of a conversation with him that she hasn’t let him in on, but he obediently saves the report he was actually writing and goes to find out what kind of takeout they’ve gotten this time.

“You’re wrong,” Jemma is saying as he walks into their makeshift breakroom, “I’ve looked it up and you’re _wrong_!”

Fitz is scowling about something, but he brightens up after a moment. “I built an app for that, actually.”

“For being wrong?” May asks, raising an eyebrow.

Antoine receives what looks like a box of chow mein and a pair of disposable chopsticks from Coulson as he sits down.

“Yes!” Fitz says excitedly, and then his expression clouds. “But it didn’t meet, er, any of SHIELD’s moral guidelines, so they shut me down.”

“SHIELD had moral guidelines?” Skye looks doubtful.

“As it turns out, yes,” Fitz replies, reaching for the soy sauce.

There’s a pause, and then Skye asks: “…but wasn’t SHIELD mostly HYDRA at that point?”

Fitz shifts in his seat. “Stop looking at me like that!”

Coulson is unsuccessfully hiding his laughter behind another mug of his ubiquitous coffee, while Jemma has her head in her hands.

“So, just so I’ve got this right,” Skye continues, “you created an app _so evil_ that even the secret murdery Nazi assholes made you stop?”

Fitz flails his hands a bit. “It wasn’t evil!” he protests. “It was just… well, I wouldn’t say _evil_. Maybe… slightly malevolent.”

“Leo’s being modest,” Jemma pipes up. “It was evil. It had a nice colour scheme though, very legible font choices.”

Coulson chokes on his noodles.

“Why would you need an app to stop you being wrong?” Antoine asks at last. “Isn’t that what google was made for?”

Fitz stares at Antoine like he’s grown an extra head, or possibly discovered some kind of impossible truth.

“I think that might’ve been Wikipedia,” Skye says into the pause. “But, hey, I used to go change articles on there all the time.” Coulson looks at her, and she adds: “very important Rising Tide stuff, of course.”

“What, it’s not trolling if you’re a freedom fighter?” Antoine enquires.

“Right!” Skye says. She nearly pulls it off, too. “Maybe we should just all sit in silence and eat our noodles,” she adds.

“Good idea,” May agrees dryly, but her eyes are twinkling.

-

The trashy magazines are piling up all around the Playground, though no one is brave enough to claim ownership; Antoine is pretty sure Skye’s the one bringing in _People_ , but he doesn’t have any proof; she’s the one with access to the security cameras, after all. He even found Coulson flicking aimlessly through a copy of _US Weekly_ , immersed in an article about Rihanna, when they were meant to be having a discussion about how many field agents they’d realistically need.

It’s entirely possible that Koenig wants them all dead by now. He spends his life doing things that look much more productive than the things the rest of them are doing, maybe more than all of them put together, and whenever he shows up to double-check that nobody’s turned HYDRA overnight he just seems kind of disappointed.

“Yeah,” Sharon sighed on the phone the other night, “HYDRA actually got shit done. You’ve got, what, the mavericks, the zombies, the broken.”

“We don’t call Agent Coulson a zombie to his face,” Antoine replied, and Sharon laughed, and he didn’t ask her to come back.

Sharon’s an old friend: they met at SHIELD Academy, started a Legacy Club that they never actually made glittery membership cards for, but kind of unironically meant to. 

(“Hey,” she said, a few weeks to graduation, six shots of tequila down and somebody else’s plastic tiara askew on her hair, “at least your grandfather was just BFFs with Captain America. I’m pretty sure my aunt _banged him_.”

The Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter Story has inspired a bunch of terrible movies, worse novels, dreadful books that claim to know the entire truth, and horrifying conspiracy websites. Peggy Carter’s never said one word about it, at least not to anyone who’s leaked anything; she’s classy, Peggy, and maybe understands that a collective consciousness story can be more powerful, more inspiring, than whatever the truth ever was.

“At least you’re not Captain America’s kid?” he suggested, and Sharon clinked their shotglasses together.

“I’ll drink to that.”)

Now, he waits for Sharon to text back and drinks a black coffee and keeps turning the pages of _Anna Karenina_. He could go home, to the new apartment and all his shit in boxes that he hasn’t unpacked yet, like if he puts off the inevitable things might make somehow go back to the way they were.

“No one’s read _Moby Dick_ , you know,” Fitz says. He looks like he hasn’t slept in about three days, which is presumably right, and his hair is sticking on end, his eyes a little bloodshot. Antoine waves at the half-full coffee pot and Fitz grabs for it.

“I have,” Antoine replies, placid. He’s still not completely sure where he stands with Fitz, but things are definitely less actively hostile and, hey, he can live with that. “Or do you want to talk about that time I read _War and Peace_?”

Fitz takes a gulp of his coffee. “You have not read _War and Peace_.”

Antoine shrugs. “You run around Europe looking for a fugitive, there’s only so many games of poker you can play with your teammates before you start wanting each other dead.”

Fitz considers him for a long moment, head tipped to one side. “I’ve read _Ulysses_ ,” he says at last.

Finally catching on to what seems to be happening here, Antoine muses that he’s never taken part in a pissing contest like this before. He could win it, he thinks, but maybe the point is that he doesn’t have to. That it might be better not to.

“Got me there,” he says, and salutes Fitz with his coffee cup. It’s not like he understood a word of _Ulysses_ , anyway. Well. At least not the first time around.

-

Topics of conversation over lunch today include a heated debate over whether Coulson needs an eyepatch in order to make everyone feel more comfortable with the transition between him and Fury, and, if yes, do they need to do something to one of his eyes?

“Does it need to be the _same_ eye?” Skye muses, picking the pickles out of her sandwich. “Or should it be the other one, like a contrast?”

Coulson is placidly watching this discussion, one of those semi-permanent smirks curling his mouth, occasionally reaching to steal one of Skye’s discarded pickles. If he minds that they’re all casually discussing possibly maiming him, he doesn’t mention it.

“What do you think, Trip?” he asks at last.

Antoine shrugs. “The only time I met Nick Fury, he said: ‘fuck your grandfather’.”

“He did not,” Skye says.

“He said some words to that effect,” Antoine replies.

It’s kind of true, kind of not true, and it was actually pretty weird how long people could work for SHIELD and yet never meet the director.

“Maybe all SHIELD directors need one eye that doesn’t work,” Jemma interrupts before anyone can ask anything else, “like, a symbolic blindness.”

“…that doesn’t even make sense,” May tells her.

“You guys talk about the weirdest shit in your downtime,” Antoine says, because none of them seem to have noticed this at _all_.

Coulson looks vaguely ruffled. “What did your old team talk about over lunch?”

“You know…” Antoine waves a hand. “Usual stuff. Sports games none of us had time to see because we were too busy trying to save lives, how great nachos are, that kind of thing.”

Skye tips her head to one side. “I like nachos.”

“Nachos are good,” Fitz agrees.

“We could have Nacho Thursdays in the new cafeteria,” Coulson suggests, cheerful.

“Nacho Tuesdays,” May corrects him.

“Nacho Tuesdays,” Coulson nods.

“Okay, okay,” Antoine cuts in, raising his hands in surrender, “I see what you guys are doing here.”

“What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?” Jemma asks the table. “Nacho cheese!”

Skye winces. “That is _terrible_.”

“What kind of cheese do you use to hide a horse?” Fitz says. “Marscapone!”

“That has nothing to do with nachos,” Coulson reminds him.

“It’s in the cheese-nachos area,” Fitz protests.

“You guys are awful,” Antoine announces, “ _really_ awful,” but he can’t stop himself from grinning anyway.

-

Antoine has a horrible suspicion that Coulson announced the words: _Helicarrier Logistics Meeting Number Eighty-Two_ into the voice recorder before they kicked off this afternoon. Sometimes, building a new SHIELD feels like Groundhog Day; except that if it was, the numbers wouldn’t keep getting bigger.

Jemma, to Antoine’s left, is nodding intently at everything May says, and playing 2048 on her Starkpad. On his right, Skye occasionally pipes up something about wifi coverage when you’re hanging in the air, but seems to actually be hacking the twitter of a pretty famous British boyband member.

Antoine mostly just wants a nap, or failing that, some kind of alcohol. Skye did suggest a drinking game they could play at a meeting one day, points for certain phrases used or past incidents cited, vodka in Evian bottles and an actual scoring system that Jemma could keep track of, but they decided to save it until either May decides to disappear on a mission of her own, or the meeting numbers of the helicarrier thing hit triple figures.

“You guys should lift that fraternizing rule,” Skye is saying when Antoine tunes in to find he’s been doodling so hard on the legal pad in front of him that his pen’s bitten through three layers of paper and Jemma’s started a game of hangman on the edge nearest her. He suggests the letter E, and then looks to May.

“The fraternization rule was put there for a reason,” she says, stiff, like they don’t all know that she broke it, and _how_.

“Yeah, and then it turned out nobody knew each other and everyone was HYDRA!” Skye reminds her. “Maybe if some more dating and hanging out and SHIELD-organised social things happened then people would be less like crazy Nazis and more like fun colleagues who like each other and don’t shoot each other in the face.”

“…did Rising Tide have regular cocktail parties?” Fitz asks doubtfully, as Coulson says: “so you want us to throw some kind of prom?”

“Screw all of you,” Skye says. “I’m just saying, there should be the option to talk about stuff that isn’t classified and doesn’t involve stabbing.”

“Are you about to suggest a sewing circle?” Antoine asks. “Are we all going to start up quilting?”

“We could have a book group!” Jemma exclaims. Antoine looks down at his notepad to find that there is apparently no E in her word, and she’s started drawing the gallows.

“Yes.” Fitz’s voice is flat. “That would not be in any way disastrous and terrible.”

Skye snickers. “Coulson will only suggest Books Steve Rogers Has Probably Read, right?”

“Actually,” Coulson says mildly, “Romanov gave him a copy of _Fifty Shades_ for Christmas.”

“Oh god,” Fitz breathes, “oh god, I cannot unknow that.”

“Did she give him the branded sex merchandise to accompany it?” Jemma asks brightly. They all turn to look at her. “What, I can know things! It’s my job to know things!”

She’s flushing, but keeps her gaze steady.

“Oh my God,” Fitz moans, “Captain America is ruined forever. _Forever_.”

“Well, you’ve clearly never spent any amount of time on the internet,” Skye remarks. This time it’s Coulson’s turn to raise an eyebrow at her. “What? Like Jemma said, I can know things!”

“Well,” May says smoothly, “this has gotten… disturbing. And is why SHIELD personnel are not going to have any form of officially sanctioned book club, knitting circle, or dance classes.”

“I kind of like the sound of the dance classes, actually,” Coulson says, and manages to hold a straight face for an admirable amount of time.

-

Since they’ve already got an expert on shooting people in the face and getting out of there clean, it’s Antoine’s medical training that people are calling for. It means an amount of coordination with Jemma, which goes fine as long as he manages to catch her before her sixth cup of coffee and hides the Skittles, and a lot of depressing sifting through stacks of files of medical personnel who worked for SHIELD and paid the price for it. They’re going to have to recruit new doctors, surgeons, nurses – maybe this time some of them might even get out alive. 

SHIELD: where even if you never set foot in the field, you’re doomed anyway.

Any medical personnel they track down or persuade back into the organisation will need training for situations no one’s ever had to prepare for, to deal with medical emergencies caused by substances that have never been come across before. And that’s even before you start talking about the thing that brought Coulson back from the dead, ethical dilemmas and crazed technology everywhere.

Not that that option’s on the table anymore. And that’s good; they don’t need another Tahiti situation on their hands.

“So,” Skye says on what is possibly a coffee break, if you can call picking through the herbal teabags at 3 a.m. while trying not to listen to _Firework_ blasting from Fitz’s lab.

“So,” Antoine says. He wants a KitKat so bad. So, so bad. Years of keeping away from junk food, and it’s all breaking down now. To be fair, there are worse things that are broken than his determination not to eat processed sugar, but at this time of the morning, he’s not sure he can think of them.

“Do you guys at SHIELD just take it in turns to fake your own deaths?” Skye asks, dropping a blackcurrant teabag into a mug. “Because that seems confusing, and not a good way to run a business. Secret government organisation. Whatever.”

Antoine considers it, reaching for a blackcurrant tea of his own. It won’t taste good, but it smells great, so, better than nothing.

“I have never faked my own death for fun or profit,” he offers.

“Or ex-girlfriends?” Skye enquires, raising an eyebrow.

“Or exes,” Antoine confirms.

“Well,” Skye says, “that’s good. ‘Cause, like, there’s only six of us and it’ll be awkward if most of us are pretending to be dead. And I don’t think I own anything good to wear to a funeral, fake or not.”

“Bring that up at the next meeting,” Antoine suggests, determinedly unwrapping one of the vegan cereal bars he’s going to enjoy _much more_ than a KitKat. “Funeral clothing allowance.”

“Why stop at funerals?” Skye asks, “can we get a shoe allowance?”

“Tell May you should get one,” Antoine says. “She’ll _love_ that.”

“She will,” Skye agrees, “and then, you know, it’ll be my turn to fake my death.”

-

“It’s summer!” Jemma announces during their morning coffee break on what Antoine thinks might be Friday. “We could have a project!”

Skye raises her head blearily from where she’s been watching the rushes for a movie that Antoine knows for a _fact_ is not out for six months. “It’s summer?” she asks.

“When you say project…” Antoine begins, wary.

“Summer Of Inadvisable Romantic Relationships!” Jemma says, still in the same delighted tone. There are three empty mugs in front of her, and one full of Skittles. No one is sure when she last slept.

“Um, two of us have already done that,” Skye points out. “With, hey, the same Murder Nazi guy.”

“If you’re about to suggest a Summer Of Sexual Experimentation, I’m walking,” Fitz warns, reaching for Jemma’s Skittles. She literally snaps her teeth at him, and he backs off.

“What about a Summer Of Everyone Doing Their Actual Jobs And Getting Some Stuff Done?” Coulson suggests from where he’s brewing yet another pot of coffee.

Everyone ignores him.

“Also,” Antoine adds, “why are we suddenly in a nineties high school movie? Did someone explain that at any point?”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’, then,” Coulson murmurs to himself, and sighs.

“Why wouldn’t we be in a nineties high school movie?” Skye asks. “We’ve got nerds-” she nods to Jemma and Fitz, “-jocks,” she waves at Antoine and Coulson, “-weird emo kids-” she indicates herself, “and, well, okay, maybe we don’t have the hot bitchy queen bee cheerleader type…”

It’s this moment, of course, that May chooses to walk in. 

They hold it together for maybe ten seconds, and then everyone explodes into laughter; Coulson literally clinging to the coffee machine, Jemma pressing her face into the table. May’s expression says that she’s going to kill all of them and it’s going to be excruciating, but Antoine can’t stop laughing and, hey, he thinks, maybe there’s some kind of future here after all.

-


End file.
